


and carry only ashes in my soul

by procellous



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Bittersweet Ending, Canon Compliant, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Sorry Not Sorry, if you are expecting fluff you are on the wrong day for that, mentions of Jon/Tormund
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-10-24 04:37:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20700071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/procellous/pseuds/procellous
Summary: 5 times Sansa went down to the crypts (+ 1 time she didn't need to)





	and carry only ashes in my soul

i.

Sansa had given the sculptors clear instructions, and the result was a set of statues that looked almost like life. Robb’s curls were a little too neat, even so; his mouth a little too grim. He didn’t look much like the laughing boy who had snowflakes melting in his hair as he kissed her goodbye, but he did look very kingly, with Grey Wind beside him and a sword in his hand. Fierce and strong, but with a certain gentleness as his hand rested on Grey Wind’s head; every inch of him everything that a king should be. 

_Robb Stark,_ the inscription read, _King in the North, King of the Trident. The Young Wolf._

To his left stood Theon, looking as he had on the night that he fell; his bow was half-drawn in his hands, his chin raised in defiance of an unseen foe. The kraken curled proudly across his chest. 

_Theon Greyjoy._ She had struggled to find the words for his statue; he had been so much—ward, friend, brother, traitor, prisoner, savior—and in the end had few enough titles he would have wanted to be remembered by. In the end she had settled on simply _Now and always._

The space to Robb’s right was blank; her own statue would stand there, in time, as would Arya’s. 

Across from Robb, smiling proudly at their eldest son, Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn stood hand-in-hand. _Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell, Warden of the North_. _Catelyn Tully Stark, Lady of Winterfell._

There was a space between her father and her aunt, a space for Jon’s statue, when that time came, but beside her mother was Rickon’s statue. Her littlest brother was a mystery to her; he had been a small child when Sansa went south, and so much of his life was unknown to her. She had bid the sculptors to show him riding Shaggydog like a horse, grinning through his curls. _Rickon Stark._

Only two of the graves held any remains. Rickon and Shaggydog’s bones lay among the stones of Winterfell, and half of Theon’s ashes were beneath his statue. There had been so few of them, in the end, but she had gathered them up, sealed half in an urn to send to his sister, and buried half in the crypts beneath Winterfell, to keep something of him close. 

She had written to Yara Greyjoy, a woman she had never met, and after half a night’s agonizing over the words the letter simply said: _He fought the Night King hand-to-hand, and did not die afraid._

Sansa ran a hand over the stone fur of Grey Wind’s head. There was space here for her grave, and Arya’s, and Jon’s, and Bran’s. If she lived still when Bran’s time came, she would surely know about it; but there was every chance that Arya’s death and Jon’s would pass unknown to her; that they would be laid out somewhere by strangers—not with her hands, not with her tears. 

As Robb was. As Mother and Father were, as Lady was. Rickon and Theon, at least, she had laid out herself; she had held their cold faces and wept for them. 

What a bitter fate. The pack survives, her father had always said, and yet here she was: the last Stark in Winterfell.

ii. 

“Jon came today,” she said, adjusting her cloak over her shoulders so that the babe tucked against her side was warm even in the cold crypts. “He won’t stay, of course; he’ll leave for the Wall again in a few weeks, or sooner. I told him that I had pardoned him, reminded him that he has a home in Winterfell, but he won’t hear of it. Too honorable by half, our Jon, but I don’t think it’s the guilt that keeps him in the Far North. I think it just hurts him too much to be here without you.” She looked up at Robb’s statue and sighed. It hurt her as well, with an ache like a half-healed bruise she couldn’t stop pressing on. She sat in her brother’s seat—though he had never sat in it himself—and wore her brother’s crown—though his crown of swords had been lost with his body—and stood in her brother’s place. “And he thinks I don’t know about him and Tormund. As though either of them are at all subtle.”

The stone figure of her brother didn’t answer her, of course; even if Robb’s bones had been brought back and buried in the crypts instead of abandoned and scattered somewhere in the Riverlands, he was beyond answering. Earth and nothingness, dust and a breath of air, colder than ashes and later than shadow. Just a crack in the world where the light had slipped through. 

While she wasn’t looking, he had simply disappeared, as though he had never been.

“He brought a babe with him, though, and gave her to my care. He didn't say much about where she came from, but I think she has his eyes. They're just like our father's, don't you think? Jon wanted her raised in Winterfell.” She stroked the babe’s soft curls—red as flame, even in the dim light—and the babe cooed, grabbing at one of Sansa’s loose locks. “I suppose there are advantages to being the Queen; if I name a babe Stark no-one can gainsay me. Robb, I’d like you to meet your niece Robbyn Stark, my daughter and heir.”

iii. 

The children trailed after Sansa into the crypts. They weren’t hers by blood, but there had been so many orphans after the wars that she took in some of them, babes too young for the orphanages to take. Winter-children claimed by the name of Stark; she would never be a wife again, but she could yet be a mother. Robbyn was her heir, of course, because everyone knew that Robbyn was the only one that shared her blood—but in the years after her there was Kathir, wild and free, and Eddwyne, so much like her namesake that it hurt sometimes, and Rickon, who never lost his wild grin or laugh, and Jon, prone to chewing over a thought until the bones of it were picked clean; Arya, sharp as swords, and the twins Lyanna and Brienne, who were as different in manner as they were similar in look, and Theon, the littlest, the last of them, who was never far from her side. 

She had not thought to name a child for Theon, but she had seen the babe’s eyes and they were a storm at sea, the same greenish-grey that she had known so well, and she had known what the boy’s name must be. 

She ran a hand along Theon’s soft curls, and he gave her a gap-toothed grin in return. 

They learned of their family, down in the crypts; the stories of their kin. Her elder brother Robb, who started the fight to win the North free, who made lions run in fear of him; her parents, fallen defending their children; Rickon, his young life cut short by treachery. She told them of her sister Arya, who slew the Night King, and Jon, who was King-Beyond-the-Wall. She told them of her brother Bran, who ruled now in the South. 

“Who’s he?” Arya asked, pointing at the statue beside King Robb, his head held high as he faced an unseen foe. 

“That is Theon Greyjoy, my brother’s sworn brother. I owe him my life,” she said, and she told them of Theon Greyjoy, unbroken in the last, with tears in her eyes; and little Theon Stark looked up at his namesake as he clung to his mother’s hand. 

iv.

“Go on then,” Sansa said, dismissing the guards with a gentle gesture. “I’m in no danger from ghosts.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” they said, bowing. 

She watched them go with a sad smile. Had they always been so young? They were barely more than boys. 

Or perhaps she was just old—her once-red hair white as snow, her hands trembling and unsteady. She was older than any of her family. Bran was still alive, but Bran would always be her little brother: no matter how old he got, or how much he knew, he would always be a little boy to her. A little boy with dreams of being a knight…

But she was older now than her father or her mother had ever been; older now than Jon or Arya had ever been. It had been one of the rare moments when she had seen a trace of emotion across Bran’s blank face; he had come to Winterfell only twice since he had become king, once for Arya’s death and once for Jon’s. He had been there when they had set up the statues for them over empty dust, and both times she had seen a tremor in his lip and a tear on his cheek. 

“Look at you,” she told Theon. “Still handsome, after all these years.” 

She’d had a lifetime to gather regrets about her like a cloak, and yet she still regretted that she had never said the words she had carried in her heart to Theon. Not _Thank you_, not _I’m sorry_, not even _You have a home here_, but _Please, stay_. 

She would have given him anything he’d wanted, if only he’d stay in Winterfell with her; in a way, she had gotten her wish. Just like she had gotten her wish to become Queen. Everything you want at the cost of everything you have: that was the bargain Fate had always given her.

He had been so small, in the end. That was what she remembered most of it; the urn had been so very small, but it was warm, as though some of the warmth of Theon’s skin had lingered around it. 

“I wish I could see your smile again. Even just once more.”

v. 

Sansa of House Stark, First of Her Name, the Queen in the North and the Lady of Winterfell, passed away in her sleep on a midwinter’s night, nearly a century old. She had reigned for fifty years before passing her crown to her daughter, and spent her last twenty-five years enjoying the comforts of her long labors. 

Her body was borne into the crypts on a bier of weirwood branches and laid to rest beside her kin. All of Westeros grieved for her, even the Free Folk beyond the Wall, but the North most of all mourned their beloved queen: the Queen who Won the North, the First Queen, the Red Wolf. Her statue, commissioned by Queen Robbyn, showed her with one hand resting gently on a direwolf’s head, the other hand open in welcome. Chains of northern flowers were draped over her steel crown and looped around her neck and arms. She stood, decked in flowers, between the empty graves of Robb and Arya Stark, their swords guarding her open hand. 

It was said that at the request of her youngest child, who had tended her while age made her sharp mind dull, some of the ashes were taken from the grave of Theon Greyjoy and placed with her body. 

What secrets she had revealed to him Theon Stark, Prince of Winterfell, never told—but he gazed up at the carved face of his namesake, fierce and proud and defiant to the end, and his heart whispered the word _father_. 

_i._

In a Winterfell that shone forever with a childhood summer, a memory of dappled sunlight as fragile as spun sugar, Sansa Stark flew along the road to the flung-open gates. The bells rang in welcome for the returning daughter of Winterfell. Lady bounded up to greet her first, barking happily and nosing at her cheeks, and Robb not far behind her. He caught his sister in a tight embrace just through the gate, kissing her forehead as he had when she had left on that long-ago summer’s day, reunited now at long last. 

Rickon demanded her attention next, eternally half-grown, but with a strength to his arms. She had left him a babe, and now he was almost an adult; almost, but not quite. Bran smiled and laughed as she ruffled his hair; he was not the cold Three-Eyed Raven, but her sweet brother, and she wondered what truth he had said when the Three-Eyed Raven told Meera that Bran Stark was dead. Arya was as she had been when she left for the West, down to the sword at her hip, and grinned when Sansa hissed in her ear that she expected to hear about all her adventures. If she noticed the tears falling into her hair, she said nothing. Jon laughed when Sansa grabbed him in a tight embrace around his ribs, but his embrace was so fierce that the air was almost knocked from her lungs. 

Her mother kissed both her cheeks, beaming, and her father held her tightly and told her that he was so proud of her.

And standing beyond them, leaning casually against a wall, tall and proud and whole, was Theon Greyjoy. All griefs forgotten, she ran to him, her red hair streaming out behind her like a victory-banner. 

She cupped his cheeks in her hands, drawing his face up to hers, and kissed him at last.


End file.
